About

The world's first gallery for experimental cinema

Inaugurated in September 2005 in Paris, The Film Gallery is an outlet for the ongoing efforts of RE:VOIR to expose a wider audience to experimental films. As the first gallery in the world exclusively dedicated to experimental cinema, the mission of the Film Gallery is to promote artists whose work bridges the realms of cinema and domains such as the visual arts (Stéphane Marti, Jeff Scher, Paul Sharits), poetry (Peter Rose), sculpture, and performance arts. Some have participated in multidisciplinary movements such as Dadaism (Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling), Letterism (Maurice Lemaître), and Fluxus (Jonas Mekas, Jeff Perkins).

The Film Gallery also provides projection equipment to museums and galleries from New York to China, in order to screen film works on film rather than video. We rent projectors and loopers and offer maintenance services in Super-8mm, 16mm and 35mm. Museums we work with include the Pompidou Center, the Jeu de Paume Museum,
The Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, the Palais de Tokyo, la Maison Populaire de Montreuil, the Armory Show, the Mudam Museum and many private galleries.

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The Film Gallery

Alexandre Alexeieff

Alexandre Alexandrovitch Alexeieff was a Russian Empire-born artist, filmmaker and illustrator who lived and worked mainly in Paris. He and his second wife Claire Parker (1906–1981) are credited with inventing the pinscreen as well as the animation technique totalization. In all Alexeieff produced 6 films on the pinscreen, 41 advertising films and illustrated 41 books.

Born in Ufa, Russia in 1901, Alexandre Alexeïeff spent his childhood between Turkey and Russia. He moved to Paris in 1920 and worked as a stage designer and costume designer for directors such as Louis Jouvet, Georges Pitoëff and for the Ballets Russes and the Swedish Ballets. Passionate about drawing and engraving, he also illustrates many books by Giraudoux, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Poe, Malraux, Baudelaire ...

In 1931, Alexeïeff, with the help of his companion Claire Parker, wanted to give life to his engravings and developed a new animation technique known as the pin screen. Thousands of pins are fixed on a vertical panel lit by grazing light and can be driven in or out at will. The shadows of the pins make it possible to form an infinite variety of images that will then be filmed one by one.

In 1933, Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker made their first film together based on this technique, A Night on the Bald Mount, a fantastic illustration of the music of Modeste Moussorgsky. They will realize four others using this same technique: By the way (1944), The nose (1963), Pictures of an exhibition (1972) and Three themes (1980).

Alexandre Alexeïeff has also directed numerous commercials in animated volumes and tabulations, a technique invented by him which consists in generating with the help of pendulums, light patterns in long exposure.
Alexandre Alexeïeff died in 1982.

Patrick Bokanowski

Patrick Bokanowski was born in 1943. From 1962 to 1966, he follows studies of photography, optics, of chemistry, under the direction of Henri Dimier, painter and scholar, specialist in the optical phenomena and the perspective systems. The animated films of Jean Mutschler are his first true window on the cinema, and a long time, animation will remain for him a kind of predilection at the same time as a privileged ground of experimentation. The images which it films, Patrick Bokanowski would like to make them more expressive, the more fluid forms: he then puts himself to collect ends of glass, curve, bullé, hammered and tries himself to film with through. The result not being completely convincing, it manufactures optics helped specialists and is interested in reflective surfaces then with the mirrors and the mercury baths, kinds of mirrors moving. Its technique of the reflective mirrors through which it films a completely distorted reality takes all its direction in "At the edge of the lake". This film required for its realization, an erudite provision of almost fifteen mirrors méticuleusement manufactured and selected among tens of samples of work. In thirty years, Patrick Bokanowski will carry out seven films, without words, where the music composed by his Michele wife, occupies a dominating place. He also exposes paintings, drawings and photographs.

Robert Breer

Robert Breer is both an artist and an animator. He lived in Paris from 1949 until 1959, and it was there that he started painting. FORM PHASES (1952) was one of his first films. He used an old Bolex camera for his earlier films, which were simple stop motion studies based on his abstract paintings. He began to experiment with flip books. These animations were done on 4”x6” cards. These cards have become the standard for all of Breer’s work even today. Breer’s early work was influenced by various European modern art movements of the early 20th century. Breer was associated with the Denise Rene Gallery, which specializes in geometric art. Here he also saw the abstract films of such pioneers as Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttman, and Fernand Léger. Breer acknowledges his respect for this purist, “cubist” cinema that uses geometric shapes moving in time and space. In Paris, in 1955, he helped organize and exhibited in a show called “Le Mouvement.” This paved the way for new cinema aesthetics. In the late 1950s Breer returned to the U.S. He taught at Cooper Union between 1971 and 2001.

Viking Eggeling

Viking Eggeling (1880-1925)
Born in Sweden to a family of German origin, Viking Eggeling emigrated to Germany at the age of 17, where he became a bookkeeper, and studied art history as well as painting. From 1911 to 1915 he lived in Paris, then moved to Switzerland at the outbreak of World War I. In Zurich he became a associated with the Dada movement, became a friend of Hans Richter, Jean Arp, Tristan Tzara, and Marcel Janco. With the end of the Great War he moved to Germany with Richter where both explored the depiction of movement, first in scroll drawings and then on film. In 1922 Eggeling bought a motion picture camera, and working without Richter, sought to create a new kind of cinema. Axel Olson, a young Swedish painter, wrote to his parents in 1922 that Eggeling was working to "evolve a musical-cubistic style of film – completely divorced from the naturalistic style." In 1923 he showed a now lost, 10 minute film based on an earlier scroll titled Horizontal-vertical Orchestra. In the summer of 1923 he began work on Symphonie Diagonale. Paper cut-outs and then tin foil figures were photographed a frame at a time. Completed in 1924, the film was shown for the first time (privately) on November 5. On May 3, 1925 it was presented to the public in Germany; sixteen days later Eggeling died in Berlin. For more on Eggeling see the book Viking Eggeling 1880-1925 by Louise O’Konor.

Marcel Hanoun

Marcel Hanoun, born on 22 October 1929 in Tunis, Tunisia and died 22 September 2012 in Créteil, France was a filmmaker, photographer and French author. He is best known for his films “La Nuit Claire”, “Une Simple Histoire” and “L’Hiver”.

EXHIBITIONS:

Takahiko Iimura

Takahiko Iimura has been a pioneer artist of Japanese experimental film and video, working in film since 1960 and with video since 1970. He is also a widely established international artist, having numerous exhibitions in Japan, the USA, and in Europe. One of his early films, "Onan", was awarded Special Prize at the legendary Brussels International Experimental Festival, 1964. Recently he has been involved in using the computer, publishing multimedia CD-ROMs/DVDs combining film, video, graphics, text, and animation.

Iimura is one of the pioneers of cinema, video and installation production in Japan. He began his artistic career producing experimental films in the sixties in New York. In 1962 he made his first experimental film, “Junk”, on ecological issues. He followed this with other productions such as “Love” (1962) and “Onan” (1962) that explored erotic images and social criticism. His first audiovisual installations, which included “Dead movie” (1964) and “Projection piece” (1968) used film projections.

In 1970 he produced his first video work, “Blinking”. In the nineties he produced multimedia works such as “AIUEONN six feature” (1993), an interactive version of the installation of the same name. In 1997 he produced “Meta media”, a complex interactive installation in which the visitors control the images of his first cinema productions.

In 2001 he exhibited the video installation “Observer/observed” at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico. In 2002 he presented the audiovisual installation “Seeing/hearing/speaking” at the Art Village Center, Kobe, Japan. This is based on “Speech and Phenomena", a book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and looks at the relation between talking and hearing through videos produced between 1978 and 2001, which can be viewed in linear format or in fragments.

His work has won various awards, and has been shown at numerous festivals and exhibitions in many different countries around the world.

Christian Lebrat

Christian Lebrat (born in 1952) is a filmmaker, video artist, photographer and French editor. Since 1976, Lebrat created twenty films, videos and performances to film. These works are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou and the FNAC (National Fund of Contemporary Art).
Lebrat was inspired by abstract expressionist painting, especially paintings by Mark Rothko, and secondly, by the radicalism of films by Peter Kubelka which he published the first monograph. Lebrat’s films can be characterized by the decomposition of the image particles (strips of light) with the goal to blow up the frame of the image and form novel color intensities. Lebrat did not intend total abstraction but rather the culmination of a narrative and conceptual film. Lately, he incorporated the paint directly on film in his work and has developed a video work in the form of a projection or installation.

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Maurice Lemaitre

Maurice Lemaître (born April 23rd 1926 in Paris) is an artist, writer and French poet. He is known to be one of the main figures of lettrisme, a movement started in the 1950s.
Lemaître was educated at the School of Arts and Crafts and Public Works. After taking part in the Liberation of Paris, he began his philosophy degree at the Sorbonne.
In 1948, he began his career as a journalist and wrote for the newspaper of the libertarian movement. A year later, he met Isidore Isou and immediately became interested in his political and avant-garde thoughts.
In 1950, Lemaître becomes very invested in the Lettrist group and created in the same year the "Youth Front", a political journal; while simultaneously creating a literary and pictorial magazine, entitled "Ur," which remains as "The Minotaur" of lettrism. Since his literary creations, Lemaître has continued to develop various fields within the Lettrist movement: poetry, theater, dance, novel, painting, photography, film, economy, psychopathology and psychotherapy . Despite his dedication to the movement, since 2000, Lemaître distanced himself from the movement and is now relatively isolated from the main group.

Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas was born December 24th, 1922 in Semeniskiai, Lithuania. In 1944, Jonas Mekas and his brother, Adolfas, were taken by the Nazis and imprisoned in a forced labor camp in Nazi Germany for eight months. After the War, he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz from 1946-48 and at the end of 1949, he emigrated with his brother to the U.S. settling in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in New York. Two weeks after his arrival, he borrowed the money to buy his first Bolex 16-mm camera and began to record moments of his life. He discovered avant-garde film at venues such as Amos Vogel's pioneering cinema 16, and he began screening his own films in 1953. He has been one of the leading figures of American avant-garde filmmaking or the "New American Cinema," as he dubbed it in the late '50s, playing various roles: in 1954, he became editor and chief of Film Culture; in 1958 he began writing his "Movie Journal" column for the Village Voice; in 1962 he co-founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative (FMC) and the Filmmakers' Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films. His own output ranging from narrative films (Guns of the Trees, 1961) to documentaries (the Brig, 1963) and to "diaries" such as Walden (1969); Lost, Lost, Lost, (1975); Reminiscences of a Voyage to Lithuania, (1972); Zefiro torna, (1992) and As I was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001) have been screened extensively at festivals and museums around the world.

D.A. Pennebaker

Donn Alan "D. A." Pennebaker (born July 15, 1925) is an American documentary filmmaker and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema. Performing arts and politics are his primary subjects. In 2013, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award or "lifetime Oscar".
Pennebaker has been described as "arguably the pre-eminent chronicler of sixties counterculture"

Hans Richter

Hans Richter (born 1888 in Berlin, Germany - died 1976 in Locarno, Switzerland) was painter, sculptor and one of the most important filmmakers of avant-garde. He studied in Germany and was searching for his artistic way between expressionism and cubism. In 1916, he becomes member of Dada in Zurich, where he discovers the spirit of revolt and abstract forms. From 1920 Richter researches for animated abstract rythms. First, he paints with a roll. Next year he makes his first film Rhythmus 21 followed by others inspired by the same subject. In 1941 he exiles to the states and devotes himself to cinema and education. He is naturalized U.S. citizen. From 1944 to 1947 he directs what later is to become classic of the surrealist cinema: Dreams that Money Can Buy. He works with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger and Alexander Calder. His own biography's elements and his ideological view is playing a major role in his work.

Jeff Scher

Jeff Scher (born on December 24th, 1954) is a New York-based filmmaker, animator and painter. In 1976, Scher graduated from Bard College. His works are in permanent collections across the globe, such as: the Museum of Modern Art, Academy Film Archives, Hirshoom Museum, Pompidou Centre, Musée d’Art Moderne, Vienne Kunsthalle and the Austrian National Archive.
His most well-known works are ‘Prisoners of Inertia’ (1989), ‘Yours’ (1998) and ‘Milk of Amnesia’ (1992).
He has created and directed commercials for HBO, HBO Family, PBS, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr., Ameritek, International Film Festival and the Sundance Channel.
He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife Bonnie Siegler and their two children.

Moira Tierney

Moira Tierney is a filmmaker, she graduated from University College Dublin with a BA and a Master in Fine Arts from l'Ecole nationale d'arts de Cergy-Pontoise in Paris. In 1998, she was granted a Fulbright Scholarship to Anthology Film Archives in New York. In 2000, Moira Tierney's films were part of the American Avant-garde cinema program in Moscow. Her American Dreams #3 was listed as one of the best films of the year 2003 by the 5th Annual Village Voice Film Critics Poll. Moira Tierney shoots in super-8 or 16mm films. Here are some of her best known movies: American Dreams 1-4, Are We There Yet?, Liberty Kids, Radio Haiti (2001), You Can't Keep a Good Snake Down (2000).

Silvi Simon

Silvi Simon is a filmmaker and contemporary artist. She is a member of Burstscratch, a non-profit
group that organizes screenings and production workshops for creating handmade and
experimental films and also manages an artist-run film laboratory in Strasbourg. She works in
super-8 and 16mm, experimenting with non-standard shooting and chemical development
techniques.

She is pursuing installation work, creating objects and machines that are always inspired
by film projection, or more precisely, shadow and light, movement, optical illusion, magic
and time.

Her work takes place over several phases of research and experimentation.
In her installations, films are projected as loops using several projectors at once along a
course of phantom screens of all sizes and shapes. Each installation is unique, built for and by
the space in an attempt to imagine and other harmonious artistic interventions. The
installations are modifiable in structure.

EXHIBITIONS:

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Stéphane Marti

Stéphane Marti (born January 7, 1951 in Algiers) is a filmmaker, visual artist and teacher as well as a user of Super 8, which he has practiced for 70 years and does everything he can for it to survive the digital age. He studied under Dominique Neguez, an advocate and theoretician of experimental film, Michel Journiac, a major protagonist of the Body art and Andrew Almuro, a composer of electroacoustic music.
From 1985 to 2007, he worked at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Art from the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne and shared his experience to new generations of filmmakers in workshops. Moreover, he organizes several screenings of films from his workshops, "the Smarti Brigades".
In his films, Marti works around issues of the body, the sacred, of gender identity disorder and strategies of desire.
Attached immediately by critics at the "School of the body" cinema revolves primarily around issues of the body and the sacred, of gender identity disorder and strategies of desire. Always chiseling his films by the super 8 that combines visual splendor with artistic and against-cultural independence, he designed a operatic esthetics of the intimacy, whose mannerist decadence, the telluric forces, the splendor rituals, golds and purples forge baroque and flamboyant coordinated its "small theaters of the body".
Meanwhile, he engages in other practices such as painting, photography, installation, projection environments and shapes Totems facts assemblies, photomontages and objects from his own films and create, their combination, endless narratives, torn, fragmented as we know them in his films.
Since, in particular, The City of nine gates (Grand different cinema award and award of criticism in Hyères festival in 1977), his film work has been shown in a large number of festivals and national and international events (in Montreal , New York, London, Tokyo, etc.) and generated numerous articles and interviews.

Inauguration

The Film Gallery was inaugurated on September 10th, 2005 in Paris, France to promote the visibilty of experimental cinema.

December 16th, 2005 - February 4th, 2006

Press:

Silvi Simon

February 25th - April 1st, 2006

Press:

Christian Lebrat

April 8th - May 15th, 2006

Press:

Amy Granat

May 4th, 2006

ZIGZAG MOVIES (for P.C.)
the zigzag movies, made by cutting across..with angles and
sharp lines, though somehow still turning up
soft...Technically speaking, they were created with the
addition and subtraction of material. Then came the mother
and the earth. Though the two cancel each other out,
they can also be totally inter-changeable.
this one's for Johnny. It's all for Johnny ..Johnny
Yen..if you didn't grow up in a city by a river, it might
be hard for you to understand.
back to the movies...they're back and forth (with angles).
they are about this. for a one night paris situation.
thank you.
amy granat 4/2006
Amy Granat was born in Saint Louis MO 1976. Her
exhibitions and performances have been presented in venues
around the world including: PS1 Contemporary Art Center
(NYC), SculptureCenter (NYC), The Swiss Institute (NYC),
Le Credac (Ivry-Sur-Seine), and upcoming at The
Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Ohio).
For The Film Gallery she presents a solo, single night, 2
hour Paris exhibition.

Stéphane Marti

May 20th - July 1st, 2006

Press:

Friedl Kubelka

July 4th - September 2nd, 2006

The Film Gallery presented a series of portraits of avant-garde American filmmakers taken by Friedl
Kubelka between 1974 and 1977. Parallel with the exhibition, her recent film, “Vue tactile” (Tactile
View), made this year in 16mm with Evgen Bavcar, was projected on the glass front wall of the
gallery.

Projectors

The Film Gallery offers museums and galleries projection equipment to support and promote the visibility of film on film. We provide worldwide leasing of projectors as well as installation and maintenance of equipment in Super-8mm, 16mm and 35mm.
The projectors we currently have available for leasing are:

Please use the Contact form to inquire about leasing projection equipment.

Loopers

The Film Gallery offers museums and galleries projection equipment to support and promote the visibility of film on film. We provide worldwide leasing of loopers as well as installation and maintenance of equipment in Super-8mm, 16mm and 35mm.
The loopers we currently have available for leasing are:

Bode 16mm 120 meter
RFS 16mm 450 meter

Please use the Contact form to inquire about leasing projection equipment.

Lenses

The Film Gallery offers a selection of lenses for projectors. The lenses that are currently available for leasing are:

Film Stock

Film Accesories

The Film Gallery offers film projection equiptment and accessories including bulbs, splicers, optical sound lamps and other materials for the projection and viewing of analogue films.
We offer 50 hour ELC 12V 250W bulbs for tungsten projectors and 2000 hour 350W Xenon bulbs for Xenon projects. We also offer 4V 0.75A BRK exciter lamps for optical sound.

Maintenance

For all rentals of our projection equipment we offer optional maintenance services. Maintenance can include installation, set-up and take down of projectors and loopers, changing or replacement of bulbs and belts as well as recalibration of loopers. We also offer cleaning of projectors and film copies as well as teflon coating of looped film copies.